Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts

Saturday, August 10, 2024

Friday night news dump, when no one is paying attention: Harris-Walz campaign admits in a statement that Walz misspoke about using weapons in war

 He's been misspeaking for 18 years.

And like Harris, he's not being asked any questions and is letting an unknown person from "the campaign" do his speaking for him.

You'll never hear from him about his four other lies about his military service, and he will in future simply refer to this "clarification" about this one if he is ever asked in public in order to deflect from the others, and the press will say good enough and let him.

This is how the game is played, if you are a Democrat.

It's good to be a Democrat.

Meanwhile J. D. Vance never made any claims about "putting his life on the line", as if Walz did in Italy. Walz never made it past Italy. Vance was a USMC combat journalist in Iraq.

 


AS I SAID -- the editor



Sunday, June 30, 2024

Germany's Alternative für Deutschland is against EU bailouts of Greece and Italy and against EU membership for Ukraine

 


In discussing the party's policy platform, Weidel said AfD's future allies in the European Parliament should oppose the disbursal of taxpayer money to the "debt states" of Europe - a reference to countries such as Italy and Greece - and the idea that Ukraine belongs to the European Union, after it opened membership talks this week.

Reported here.

Saturday, October 7, 2023

Um, excuse me, America was founded by people who had given up . . .

. . . on England, and on Ireland, Germany, Italy, and the rest.


The libertarian impulse to go Galt, to run away, is a feature of America, not a bug, a built-in self-destruct mechanism which went off most spectacularly and destroyed the root in 1861.

The rest of the plant has been withering and dying on the vine ever since, overtaken by tenacious weeds.

Freedom for Christian religion combined with plenty of Lebensraum, home country memory, and time made it seem otherwise in the face of the steady decline, but here we are with Scylla and Charybdis for choices come November 2024.

The Declaration of Independence was a repudiation of politics. Two thirds of the country was not down for the struggle. Secession was a repudiation of politics. There was resistance to military conscription everywhere, but especially in the Confederacy. We were content to let the world burn for more than two years before the Japs forced our hand on December 7, 1941. We have right now the unthinkable European land war in its 20th month and sports is what trends on Twitter day in and day out. Mao killed by the tens of millions during The American Century. Americans quietly go to church every Sunday while tens of millions are aborted. It all began with migration, the most basic form of repudiating politics.

We do not need, in short, to relearn to think politically. Most of us have never thought politically in the first place. Apolitics is our politics, but this horror vacui is why the left seems to have won and why we hate them. We hate politics. As polarized as we think we are, as rigged as our politics is, 100 million eligible Americans still did not vote in 2020.

You do not get political blood from this turnip.

Ultimately, nothing could be more un-American than to give up on America.

The American idea, alas, is precisely to stay out of it. 

Here

Saturday, August 5, 2023

This week's lucky number is 2

There's only one Speaker of the House who ever spent more than 300% of current tax revenues twice.
And there's only one Speaker of the House who has ever spent more than 300% of current tax revenues twice after both of which events the ratings agencies downgraded the U.S. debt.
 


 

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Besides their bad character, what do Trump and Obama have in common in 2009 and 2020?

 Trump and Obama signed off on the two most fiscally irresponsible periods in post-war history, and Biden two years in looks set to join them.

The Executive is supposed to be a check on irresponsible spending. But both Trump and Obama went right along with it instead of vetoing the outrageous spending of the periods.














What else do they have in common?

Two crises, both of which plunged the country into hysteria.

The Great Financial Crisis did not begin to end until March 2009 when the FASB signaled its intent to suspend mark-to-market rules. The stock market bottomed almost immediately, but as with all cases of mass hysteria it took time for the panic to pass as other sectors recovered "one by one". 

The Pandemic Crisis gripped the country in March 2020, sending millions home from work, stocks plunging, toilet paper into shortage, businesses into bankruptcy, and on and on. With just about everyone vaccinated who was going to be by the end of 2021, the country gradually started to come out of it in 2022, eschewing jabs, masks, and social distancing as it became clear that the Omicron variant was infecting tens of millions despite all those measures.

2020 was the single most fiscally irresponsible year in the post-war since 1953. Federal expenditures, bloated by panicked bailouts, outpaced tax revenues by a whopping 216%.

Only 2009 comes close, at 210%, the second worst year on record.

Third, not shown, was 2010 at 196%, and fourth, not shown, was 2021 at 176%, each a part of the respective crisis periods.











Do you know what else those two years share in common?

Spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives.

In 2009 and 2020 its Speaker just happened to be the same person, as she was in 2010 and 2021.












Nancy Pelosi owns the four most fiscally irresponsible years in the entire history of the post-war. Her two speakerships literally busted out all over. 


Thursday, August 25, 2022

Italy has another opportunity to vote for someone who wants to end the immigration emergency: Giorgia Meloni of The Brothers of Italy Party


Giorgia Meloni, leading the race to become Italy's next prime minister, was accused on Monday of shameful electioneering by her rivals after posting a video of a Ukrainian woman being raped by a migrant in an Italian city. ...

Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party heads the polls ahead of a Sept. 25 national election, tweeted the video, which had been posted on a newspaper website with the image blurred but the woman's cries clearly audible.

"One cannot remain silent in the face of this atrocious episode of sexual violence against a Ukrainian woman carried out in daytime in Piacenza by an asylum seeker," Meloni wrote.

"A hug to this woman. I will do everything I can to restore security to our cities."


Reuters.

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

Libertarian America is as deluded today by cannabis as Italy was by astrology during the Renaissance



Taking cannabis regularly in your mid-20s can cause permanent damage to the brain and its legalization in some states has wrongly suggested to many that it is safe, the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has told DailyMail.com.

Dr Nora Volkow, who has led the agency for almost two decades, warned that cannabis use among young adults was a 'concern' and called for more 'urgent' research into the 'potential health risks' for the age group.

Her agency — which is part of the National Institutes of Health — revealed Monday that a record number of 19 to 30-year-olds were using cannabis in 2021, with one in ten admitting to using it every day. Around 30 percent used the drug at least once a month, with four-in-ten having used the drug at least once last year. ...
 

Health agencies in the U.S. have been warning for years there is a 'real risk' that cannabis can harm a person's mental development and their social life — including triggering problems with relationships, education and careers.

But their concerns have largely been swept under the carpet as many states push forward with legalizing the drug for recreational use.

In November another six states — Arkansas, Maryland, Nebraska, North and South Dakota and Oklahoma — are set to decide whether to also liberalize the drug's use.

More.





Monday, May 23, 2022

CNBC totally leaves out the epicenter of the Monkeypox outbreak at the Gran Canaria Pride Festival in its story about gay men transmitting the disease

 All CNBC says is:

The most recent surge in cases appears to have been spread among men who have sex with other men.

News about the Monkeypox outbreak linked to this Pride Festival has to be suppressed in the same way that the Provincetown, MA, COVID-19 outbreak from July 4, 2021 had to be suppressed because it was also in gay men. 85% of the victims were fully vaccinated men who were there to party.

The UK Sun told the truth that must not be spoken:

The Canaria Pride festival, held in the town of Maspalomas between May 5 and 15, has become a hotspot for the monkeypox outbreak, reports El País.

The massive party was attended by over 80,000 people, including three Italian men who later tested positive for the virus.

A health source told the newspaper: "Among the 30 or so diagnosed in Madrid, there are several who attended the event, although it is not yet possible to know if one of them is patient zero of this outbreak or if they all got infected there."

Thursday, March 3, 2022

Mayor Beetlejuice says “My d--- is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest d--- in Chicago”

 Here:

“You make some kind of secret agreement with Italians. ... You are out there stroking your d---- over the Columbus statue, I am trying to keep Chicago police officers from being shot and you are trying to get them shot,” Lightfoot said, according to the complaint. “My d--- is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest d--- in Chicago.”

Always thought there was something a little odd about Chicago's Mayor Lori Lightfoot. 
 



Saturday, February 26, 2022

Germany is still hedging on banning Russia from the SWIFT system at this hour after worldwide outcry at EU intransigence two days ago

And as usual Biden is a follower, not a leader, still mulling over what he should do.

Austria, Hungary, France, Italy, Cyprus all have now signaled readiness to accept the draconian measure in order to cut off Russia's access to payment flows.

Germany could easily find itself without heat very shortly if it relents.

Meanwhile Ukrainians are bravely fighting off the Russians alone.

Monday, July 5, 2021

Joel Kotkin has come around, now calls it what it is: Global fascism

In 2018, Kotkin was still tip-toeing around the obvious, but not anymore:

Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world . . .

Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.

Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. ...

fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. ...

China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. ...

But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.

Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”

Kotkin recognizes at least that American right-wing libertarianism is part of the problem, not part of the solution:

the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.

Regrettably, however, Kotkin still does not connect this failure of the old liberal order in the West with the failure of the old moral order which gave it birth and on which it depended. This is because Kotkin still sees things in primarily materialistic terms.

Kotkin is oddly politically correct when he denounces possible recourse to nativism, which blinds him to the nativism which is at the heart of Chinese state capitalism and gives it much of its appeal and strength. He calls for "a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority" in the West, not realizing that it was Protestantism which made that even possible in the first place.

The problem of the West is spiritual, and Catholicism will never be able to rise to the occasion of refounding it as long as globo-homo defines Rome. The whole idea is inimical to the notion of founding a nation "for our posterity".

Friday, June 18, 2021

Run for your lives: It's Charles Murray who is having the identity crisis, not America

Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America:

The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return.

More

What's unnatural is Murray's perennial insistence that America was not a real nation where Englishmen revolted because they were denied their "chartered rights", who hoped to secure that nation "to ourselves and our posterity" as our Constitution says. Whether one believes their claim was legitimate or not is irrelevant to the history. An America populated as a nation by Englishmen who made that argument is a fact and shows they were a nation in their own minds, and nothing the left libertarians can say will ever change that, try as they may.

That opening sentence simply begs the question. You are asked to believe something else, that the first Americans didn't actually behave as a tribe whose members were loyal to each other and didn't already have a long history together before 1776. Which of course is ridiculous.

The violence done to this original American idea by libertarians, Lincoln and his worshippers, liberals, leftists, and other assorted lunatics is what is unnatural. It's they who have the identity crisis. They don't fit in here because our institutions survive from the founding and constantly remind them that they are misfits. They represent the foreign element, and usually are the main advocates for increasing the foreign element.

Instead give me millions upon millions of Italian Americans like Antonin Scalia who bowed to America as an Anglo Saxon nation, instead of this horde of harpies for every heresy.

Wednesday, May 26, 2021

That lunatic billionaire Ronald Unz not only thinks America developed COVID-19 as a bioweapon, but released it in Wuhan

 


 He also believes the China data:

(6) Unfortunately for these plans, the Chinese government reacted with astonishing determination and effectiveness, and soon stamped out the disease. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical and incompetent American government largely ignored the problem, only reacting after the massive outbreak in Northern Italy had gotten media attention. Since the CDC had botched production of a testing kit, we had no means of recognizing that the disease was already spreading in our country, and the result was massive damage to America’s economy and society. In effect, America suffered exactly the fate that had originally been intended for its Chinese rival.

Saturday, May 1, 2021

Ann Coulter's best tweet ever

 








"America is an idea, not a place, not a people" is the BIG LIE mantra of neo-conservatism and libertarianism. 

If that's true, one should be able to explain it, write it down, teach it, and put it into practice successfully anywhere. No need to come here for it.

And of course it isn't just an idea. Millions come here and never come to learn it anymore. Millions more aren't taught it in school anymore, and don't see it in practice at home anymore.

That's why the country is a mess.

A famous Italian-American once had it figured out, as I, a German-American, once had it figured out. He starts in, in earnest, at about minute ten:









Monday, March 1, 2021

US COVID-19 update through Feb 2021

Daily new cases have dropped dramatically in February 2021, but still average 85,863 per day and remain higher than for any month before last November when the country was still in a fit of hysteria about the pandemic.












Daily new deaths had their third worst month in February 2021 and are still higher than in April last.












Hospitalizations have dropped dramatically in February to 48,871 on Saturday 2/27. Peak Saturday level was January 9th at 130,781. The Saturday peak last summer occurred on 7/25 with 59,301 hospitalized. The Saturday peak last April occurred on 4/18 with 57,761 hospitalized. 

The Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic will unaccountably stop collecting such data on March 7th. I say unaccountably because the absolute low in Saturday hospitalizations after the April outbreak was 27,967 on June 20th and the October lows never matched that.  We're not even close to those levels yet. It's WAY too early to conclude that data collection should cease when the previous lows haven't yet been taken out. 

Meanwhile, the hospitalization data collected by the University of Minnesota continues to show the second wave still in decline at the end of February. The worst states (NY in gray, CA in blue, TX in pink, and FL in green) for hospitalizations are shown in the graphs. The declines are welcome, but levels remain elevated.

Daily new case data in a number of countries, e.g. Brazil, Finland, Hungary, Czechia, France, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, in recent weeks has turned upward to one degree or another. This could be a harbinger of a coming seasonal surge.

Meanwhile about 7.5% of the US is fully vaccinated, and 15% partially vaccinated. 

It remains to be seen how effective the vaccines will be against mutations, and how durable the vaccines will be over time.


  






Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Update for COVID-19 English-speaking world case fatality rates as of 1/19/21

 Per Johns Hopkins University (data changes slightly as we write):


Global totals:
deaths 2,044,445 / cases 95,703,104
Case fatality rate 2.13%

G-7 nations Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, US, plus Australia and New Zealand:
deaths 713,992 / cases 36,041,142
Case fatality rate 1.98%
Rest of the world 2.23% 

Ten other nations with the largest English-speaking populations (India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Philippines, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Russia, Thailand, South Africa / data quality obviously varies):
deaths 295,121 / cases 17,399,153 
Case fatality rate 1.69% 

South Korea, not shown above, is a good example of how no matter what nations seem to do to stop the spread of the disease, case fatality rates everywhere seem to be ending up in the vicinity of 2%.

Early on South Korea was impressing with a rate well below 1%, but today it is at 1.75%. Japan is up to 1.33%. Much vaunted New Zealand is up to 1.10%.

Compared with Canada 2.51%, France 2.38%, Germany 2.32%, Italy 3.45%, the UK 2.61%, and Australia 3.16%, the good ole USA 1.657% is doing much better than the hysterical headlines would have you believe.

That said, in the US COVID-19 is still sixteen and half times more deadly than influenza. This is a serious crisis, the long term health effects of which are not known.

A recent long term study from May to November in the US showed an alarming rise in hospitalizations for COVID among children. Another study from the UK indicated an alarming rise in the death rate for individuals six months after recovering from COVID. The impact of the disease on the human vascular system is typically acute in the lungs, but remains a still not well understood threat to the rest of the body and its organs.

You don't want to get it. 24 million in the US already have, just 7% of the population.  

Monday, August 3, 2020

Drudge implies the woman shown is the woman named in the article, but that's not her

The 102 year old woman mentioned in the Drudge headline, story here, turned 102 in January and came down with COVID-19 in May, in the US. She was born in Massachusetts.

The woman pictured above the Drudge headline is 101. Found herHere's another story about her. She contracted the illness in late March, also in the US. She is Italian. Her mother died giving birth to her on the ship bringing them to the US.  

Another story is here about a yet different woman, 102 years old, who contracted the illness in Italy in early March and survived.

The Drudge headline originally brought to my mind a story from early April, about still one more woman, 103 years old, in Italy who beat the disease, which I have finally located here.

There are many examples giving reason for hope, even for old people.